We’ve made almost everything in the consumer world digital and accessible via mobile over the past 10 years. Amazon now sells more eBooks than print, the DMV offers vehicle registration online and most airlines encourage online flight check-ins. Yet, these new sensations have not done away with paper alternatives.

It’s no surprise that the nation’s biggest industries still greatly rely on paper-intensive records and transactions. Buying a house is still a labyrinthine process with time-sensitive signatures, courier visits and faxes. A recent survey from Anoto found that 80 percent of health professionals still use paper records. And buying a car is far from simple unless you’re buying on eBay.

Why is paperwork still a problem?

While popular cloud solutions (Box, iCloud, Google Drive) have millions of users and have made strides to improve the uploading, saving and sharing process, they still haven’t solved how to streamline collaboration across these documents. This rings particularly true when terms to be agreed upon involve multiple parties or require a signature (or ten) – commonplace in daily transactions across healthcare, financial services and real estate.

And that’s exactly where the difficult problems lie. It’s no longer the paper that’s the issue. It’s the work that surrounds the paper.

Whether we’re talking consumer or enterprise services, innovation doesn't happen in digitizing existing processes, but in fundamentally changing the way things gets done. To solve the paperwork problem, processes need to be reinvented to better reflect today’s world – and that requires a new focus on collaboration. By eliminating the ‘work’ that comes in the form of multiple versions and unnecessary back-and-forth between parties, people reach an agreement faster and get on with their days. End of story.

From Snail Mail to IM: It’s Now the Outcome that Matters

How we communicate has evolved over the past few centuries – moving the paper document from the essential vehicle for sharing information to a relic hindering the speed of business today. Whereas you needed the Pony Express to deliver a letter in the 1860s, we now have smartphones, tablets, Twitter, Skype and IM at our disposal.

A reliance on physical documents made sense when we lived in a world of the telegram, foot messengers and fax machines – a static world in which paper held the information that was being relayed, having a real-time conversation about and collaborating on the document was next to impossible, and most knowledge workers were in front of their desktop computers most of the day. Now, relying on email attachments, fax machines, static PDF documents, courier services and even e-signature applications is like making the decision to mail a letter you need an immediate answer on instead of using Google Chat. It’s just not practical.